


A Study in I Love Yous

by paxveraque



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-15
Updated: 2017-02-21
Packaged: 2018-09-24 13:10:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9729482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paxveraque/pseuds/paxveraque
Summary: Garrus and Shepard struggle with the words that come so simply to others.





	1. Chapter 1

He doesn’t tell her he loves her. Not aloud anyway. **  
**

He doesn’t say it that first night, when he stands outside her cabin door clutching a cheap bottle of wine in trembling, timid talons. He’s afraid of what it might mean if he is falling in love with her. He’s terrified of how she might take it if he admits it.

It’s casual, after all, this thing she’s asked of him.

He doesn’t say it the next morning, when he wakes to a hollow pang of rejection in the form of the empty sheets at his side. It’s casual, he reminds himself, but her absence still jars something dismal inside him. Maybe he shouldn’t have spent all those hours researching human romance rituals in the off chance–in the hope–that she wanted something more. Maybe he shouldn’t have read so deeply into the hints she’d dropped that her feelings might run deeper. She had, after all, left without a word in the middle of the night. This was casual.  

So casual. Blowing off steam. That’s what he’d signed up for.  
  
He still doesn’t say it when he finally finds her, asleep atop her modification bench, drooling over her latest project. He feels it though, when he finally realizes what dragged her from the bed in the odd hours of the night. When he sees that it’s his omnitool she’s drooling on, his omnitool that she’s hacked and networked intimately to her own. His omnitool that’s downloading biometric programming so that they could have reads on each other’s vitals if they got separated in the field. The knowledge overwhelms him, and he almost whispers the forbidden words to her sleeping form, but then Joker is on the intercom, and Shepard is placing him in charge of a separate fire team, and there is an impossible mission tearing them apart once more.  

But there’s always an impossible mission, and somehow, they keep surviving. Somehow, he keeps letting the right moments pass him by. On Menae, when she breaks the Reaper siege. On the Normandy, when she frets over whether her mother escaped Arcturus. Atop the Citadel, when he watches the indomitable Commander Shepard skew her left arm to the side and let him have the winning shot.

He takes for granted that there will always be other impossible moments. And so he doesn’t say it until it’s almost too late. Until he’s injured, and she’s calling for an evac. Until _she_ smiles at him and tells him she loves _him_ , and all he can do is stutter. The words blossom as she says them, filling the world with a warmth and light so brilliant that he struggles to remember how life might have been before; how life might be when that light is extinguished.

“Shepard, I–” he starts, and the words subside. _I don’t want you to go_ , he almost says to her. _Not without me. Stay with me. Love with me. Until the end._

He doesn’t, though.

He doesn’t because he fell in love with an impossible woman. He doesn’t because she just might listen, and the galaxy needs her impossible brilliance. He doesn’t because, in the end, he is a good turian, and this impossible mission must come first.  

Instead, after far too many missed moments, he tells her, “I love you, too.”

The words are easy, easier than he ever feared they would to be. So easy he worries that they lost their meaning; that something deeper was lost in translation. But then she smiles at him as if the galaxy weren’t crumbling apart, and he curses himself for not making her smile like that every day.   
  
She grasps his armored hand in hers and, for a second, he thinks that she might just stay anyway. But then his hand is empty, and she’s running toward enemy lines through flashes of radiant and deafening Reaper fire. And in the startling darkness that she leaves behind, Garrus clutches onto the memory of her smile, fighting with the desperate and impossible hope that he might be lucky enough to see it one last time.


	2. Chapter 2

She doesn’t admit that she loves him. Not aloud anyway.

She ignores the warnings on Omega, when her heart sings at the sight of him–when, for the briefest of moments, it seems as if everything is right in the galaxy. She almost hugs him, almost falls to pieces in the arms of her old friend. But Cerberus is watching, and she cannot let them see.

She denies it on the Normandy, when she stalks outside the med bay for hours. Miranda is incessant, but Shepard doesn’t want to give her answers, doesn’t want to explain how she did what was necessary to get him off that station in time to save his life. _You lied to me about him_ , she accuses, with more anger than she intends, _so I don’t owe you anything_.

She keeps denying it through Sidonis and the Collector Base and all the stolen moments in between. She knows the line between friend and more has long since blurred, but she can’t quite figure out when she lost track of it. She can’t determine the precise moment when her harmless attempts to make him blush became intentional flirting became–whatever it is she feels the night he comes to her cabin.

She tries not to question it when she grabs his omnitool as he sleeps. She has run through every possible strategy for their attack on the Collector Base, every way she can keep him at her side. Every plan fails except the one where he leads the second fire team, but the thought–the nightmare–of them separating drives her to distraction. Their comms could be cut, he might not reach the rendezvous point, they might have to leave when he’s nowhere to be found. She cannot stop running through every horrific possibility, and so in those final twilight hours, she links his omnitool to hers. She gives him full access to her most jealously guarded possession, so that she can track his biometrics and geolocation. Mission be damned, she will not leave him behind.

She doesn’t know where _that_ falls on the line between “just friends” and _more_ , but it is decidedly Not Casual. She supposes she shouldn’t be surprised, though. As she nervously teased him the night before, she is nothing if not intense. She has never once managed to do anything casually. Never really wanted to try.

She hopes he understood her hints.

Menae changes everything. She hasn’t heard from him in six months. She nearly gives up hope of ever seeing him when she sees the state of Palaven. But there he is, standing tall on that besieged moon, and the sight of him, alive and in command, fills her with unexpected pride and admiration. She wants to embrace him, to tell him all of the fears she’s kept inside for the past half year. But just like Omega, there are too many eyes. So instead, she shakes his hand. It’s proper and it’s formal, and rattles her in a way that makes her start to question whether this Not Casual thing she feels is actually Love. She wonders, and she fears, whether he feels the same.

The answer, of course, is obvious–when she finally pays attention. He never actually says he loves her. Not aloud at least. But he tells her every day.

He tells her when she arrives at the war room only to discover that the petulant diplomats have resolved their unnecessary disputes. He tells her when she enters her cabin well past zero dark thirty, exhausted and frayed, only to see that her mountains of paperwork have been completed in triplicate. He tells her when she finds herself in bed, boots removed, though she’s certain she fell asleep at her desk over a pile of work. And he tells her when, despite the galaxy crumbling around them, he still finds a way to make her laugh.

He tells her in all the perfect ways only he can, and sometimes she hates it. She hates that she should find something that makes her so happy while so many others suffer. She hates that they found each other in the midst of all this chaos. She hates that she sometimes wonders if they could be happy together without all the carnage.

But then he takes her to the Citadel on the most perfect date, and she’s tired of denying herself the things she feels.

Reapers be damned, she’ll steal whatever slivers of happiness they can find. “I love you, Garrus Vakarian,” she admits, to herself and to him. She knows it’s a long time coming, and the truth floods her with relief.

But he doesn’t return the sentiment. He mentions something about Joker’s vids, and she knows he’s flustered. He stutters, like he did when she first mentioned blowing off steam, and she realizes he thinks she’s still just trying to make him blush.

She doesn’t say it again.

The words are not enough, and she’s not sure what is. She obsesses over the question, keeps a mental list of a thousand ways to tell him, but she lacks the subvocals to convince him of the depth of her feeling. He deserves perfect, and she can never give that to him. So she says nothing. She doesn’t want to screw it up again.

But of all the perfect things they have–friendship, trust, respect–time is not one of them. It never has been.

And before she knows it, he is injured and he cannot go on. His mandibles flare in desperation when he realizes she intends to leave him behind, and some quiet part of her whispers that this might be her last chance.

“I love you, Garrus Vakarian,” she says, and she knows it’s not enough. “And I always will.”

She catches the droop of his jaw, the frighteningly short moment in which he realizes she’s _never_ been joking, and she melts at his response. She takes his armored hand in hers and, for a second, she is tempted to bask in this final captured moment. This sliver of time they stole from the chaos around them.

All too quickly, the screech of Reaper fire and the chattering of husks shatters that stolen moment. It’s not enough.   
  
She can’t remember drawing her weapon, but the sounds of the Reaper forces fuels something selfish inside her, and it powers her forward.

They deserves more than stolen moments in a firefight.   

He deserves more than two hastily spoken I Love Yous, only one of which he believes.

There may not be a perfect way to say it, but he deserves to hear her try. A thousand times and maybe more.

She leaves a trail of carnage, a scattering of husks and Marauders in her wake, and as she reloads her heat sink, still drunk on fury and selfishness, she promises herself that this is the last moment she will allow the Reapers to take. The rest will be hers, to cherish and enjoy. She will make the time to tell him that she loves him in each of the thousand ways she imagined.

And may the galaxy have mercy on the poor soul who tries to stop her.


End file.
